Gotham Diary:
The Day Itself
18 January 2012
Today would have been my father’s 98th birthday. It’s unlike me to remember such a thing on the day itself. I see it coming, and then I’m aware that it has past, but on the day itself the thought never crosses my mind.
My father didn’t live to be anything like 98. He died a little over 26 years ago, of cancer mostly, although we didn’t understand that until the autopsy. His last months, after an intestinal abscess nearly killed him, were fairly uncomfortable. His wife — his second wife — had her work cut out for her and did it valiantly, changing sheets and whatnot more or less round the clock.
My father, who was four years older, survived my mother by eight years. She, too, died of cancer, although we knew all about it. It started with a lump on her tongue and quickly became non-Hodgkins lymphoma. One of the nice things about living in New York is that it is very, very far from M D Anderson hospital, where I’m sure they do heroic things (although not for Christopher Hitchens, it seems), but a place that seemed a death camp to me when I left it the last time.
My father wanted me to stay in Houston, but that’s not why I went to the trouble of law school. I went to the only school that he would pay for that was outside the Southwest, our alma mater, his and mine both, Notre Dame. And then, a U-Haul attached to my Granada, Kathleen and I drove to Manhattan, where we have been ever since.
Even if I’d stayed in Houston, my father would have remarried. He developed a serious drinking problem after my mother died. All it took was one AA session to bring him round, but the loneliness was pervasive, and the trip that he took me on to Europe, in my just-dead mother’s place, established my inadequacy as a companion. (I was always reading.) My sister was better at it, but she had her own life, too.
Nonetheless, his remarriage came as a shock to me, because his second wife inspired a response that stopped just a hair short of outright antipathy. Having this woman, an Irish-Syrian doll who lived in the same apartment on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope her entire life — Park Slope when it wa respectable, then when it wasn’t, and finally during the rebound — and who dressed her hair in the manner of Veronica Lake even though she was in her mid-sixties, in our family felt like an insult. I was astonished by the force of my contempt, and being aware that my feelings were reprehensibly ugly didn’t make things easier. The woman who introduced my father to his second wife later conceded that she was “an adventuress.” However, she worked hard for the money during the last year, and, unlike me, she proved to be a very good companion. I never really thought that she was wrong for my father. She was just wrong for me.
I never saw her after my father died, but I got back to the hard work of growing up. Years and years later, I went to her funeral mass, even though I had a pretty good idea that reading her will would be stinging (it was). I wish them both the eternal rest that they prayed for. But I really do miss my father, and when he shows up in my dreams, they are always the sweetest ones.